Spam Make the Bulk of Global E-mail Load, Says Microsoft

The sixth edition of the Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report has highlighted that over 97% of total e-mails sent over Internet are junk or spam.

Most of these e-mails are fake advertisements for general and pharma products. These fake e-mails often include malicious attachments that lead to the downloading of malware into the computer systems of the recipient.

According to Microsoft UK's Head of Security and Privacy, Cliff Evans, it was, however, a good thing that bulk of the spam did not enter the user's inbox, but still some of them might pierce through. BBC reported this on April 8, 2009.

Ed Gibson, Chief Cyber Security Advisor at Microsoft, commented that higher capacity broadband, improved operating systems and powerful computers had made it an easier job to generate and send billion of spam over the net; the capacity did not exist 3-4 years ago, as per BBC report on April 8, 2009.

Microsoft's report also discovered that globally, for every 1,000 uninfected computers, there are 8.6 infected computers. This suggests that malware-infested systems are much lower than that generally analyzed by various security firms such as MessageLabs.

The report also states that the regions having less computer penetration serve as easy targets for malware distributors as security systems tend to be below standard in those areas. Consequently, huge number of computers are attacked by malware in a relatively small area.

The report also found that type of malware varies from one nation to the other. With the increasing dependence of malware ecosystem on social engineering, malware threats have become more reliant on language as well as cultural factor, thus resulting in the variation in malware distribution.

Russia and Brazil hold the topmost positions in global malware infections chart and are followed by nations such as Turkey, Serbia and Montenegro, as per the report. Also, many malicious Internet browser modifiers are widespread in China whereas malware targeting online banking customers is common in Korea (Parite and Virut being the common viruses in Korea).

However, despite the soaring malware infections across the world, Microsoft expressed its happiness owing to the increasing awareness of the Internet users to safeguard themselves against such attacks.